Shocking revelations!

One of the reasons I wanted to start home-schooling was the lack of science and math at our school. We were doing okay by the Chicago standards...but I was in grad school way too long to believe that the Chicago standards aren't nearly as rotten as our politics. I've had few worries about reading. My kids take to reading like ducks to water. We have to fine tune the grammar, and getting Hannah to write anything rather than draw it is like pulling teeth, but we're working on it. Spelling is a bit of a struggle--like grammar it's hard to make it fun. I've also never been good at spelling. Thank God for spell-check. History is a trip...and that's a good thing as we have been traveling like gypsies this year.

I've gotten better at math through the years, and I'm pretty confident that I've got a better grasp of at least the basics than some of the teachers the kids have had. I'm not so insecure, nor so secure in my math knowledge that I am worried about experimenting and trying new ways to solve problems. As I've gotten older I also find that I like math more and more because there is always a RIGHT answer. When you're analyzing a poem or writing a paper there's not always that distinction.

But my favorite subject turns out to be science. What I like most about science is that we can have fun with it. A lot of fun.

Hair raising fun!

Super-charged fun!

We used lots of fun equipment today. Batteries. Wires. Lights... We're studying electrical currents. We did experiments with static and batteries today with a short digression into what makes good conductors vs. insulators.






 Looking at this photo, I'm afraid that I might get shut down mistakenly as a bomb-making lab, but I swear, nothing exploded (apart from a balloon in a demonstration of what happens when you attach a 1.5V bulb to a 6V battery.)

I think the kids are having a good time. Not surprisingly, I think I'm the one having the best time.

Game time!

One of the coolest things about going to the United Center for a Blackhawks game is getting there a half hour before puck-drop so that we can watch the warm-up. It doesn't matter where your seats are, you can sit down on the floor, close to the glass, and watch the hockey players warm up. We like to sit right behind the goal because the pucks come right at you, and occasionally, if you are lucky, you can grab a puck as it goes over the glass. If a player hits the puck just right, the puck will sail over the glass and won't get hung up in the netting (and if there's not a huge crowd around) and you can claim a practice puck. We got one last year. I believe it was shot over the glass by Patrick Sharp. I think so because after the kids picked it up, he skated by the glass and gave the glass a whack to get the kids' attention. Hannah was worried he wanted it back. When she realized that she could keep it, she was thrilled. So was Caleb. They took turns holding it. I'm not sure where the puck is right now, but it turns up occasionally.

Getting up close to the glass really drives home what a crazy, insane game hockey can be. One thing that I've discovered about myself is that there is no way on this green earth I would ever want to get in the way of one of those pucks. Those things hit the glass with a thunk that makes your ears hurt. George tells about the time that his father caught a puck that went over the glass back in the 1970's-- it broke his father's hand.  I'd probably play hockey the same way I play soft-ball; I'd be spending a lot of time hoping that no one hits anything my direction. The problem with this strategy is that there is no outfield in hockey.

I can't think of anywhere sweeter to watch a game than from up against the glass. Not that I'll ever get the opportunity. During the skate-around, when the teams are practicing you can go up to the glass. You can sit in the lower rows. You can stand up in front. But, you CANNOT SIT IN THE FRONT ROW. The front row seats, I've discovered, are auctioned off. The price of these seats ranges between $600 and $1000 (each!!) for a regular season game. And we mere mortals with seats up in the 300 level are not allowed to even park our rear-ends in these seats for a brief respite before the game begins. We can sit anywhere else before the game begins(until the ticket-holders show up at least) but our common heinies will never grace the   posh resting place of the gilded heinie bearers that will recline in the seats against the glass.

There are special ushers who enforce the heinie hierarchy, and they will ask you to stand up if you are seated in one of the special seats. You can stand in front of the seats. You just can't sit in the seats. Of course, behind you are many more fans, all wanting to get as close to the action as possible, so standing up in front of the seats blocks other peoples' views. If you are in that front row, in front of the special seats, and the rightful ticket holders have not yet shown up, you can stay as long as you crouch in a sort of strange, crab-like posture, knees to the sides in an awkward deep knee bend, elbows knocking against the undersides of the boards, trying not to topple over into the special chairs--if you do topple you will be swooped down upon by the special ushers who remind you (politely but firmly) that you cannot sit in the special chairs.

I really don't have much of a problem with this. I mean, who wouldn't want to sit so close to the action that you can see the players up close and personal, witness the blood and sweat, and hear their skates, and watch the puck flying towards you? And what organization wouldn't want to get as much money from that desire as possible? But every person has to prioritize their spending, and our priorities are kind of wrapped up in museum memberships, clothing, food, the mortgage...I suppose that someday I could budget for a gilded seat, but that would mean going without something else. We can see the action from up high much better than from the floor anyhow, and there's no danger of being struck by a seriously dangerous puck.

My only complaint about going to a hockey game is that there is no way to guarantee the outcome. If I can only afford one game a year (and not in the special seats by any means) my team should at least be able to guarantee me a win. That didn't happen this year. But as Caleb said halfway through the game as fists started flying, "Well, if they aren't going to win, at least we'll see a good fight."

It wasn't bad. I just wish we were closer.

Stan Mikita and the kids.

Spicy!

The whole house smells like I'm making chilli, and this is okay, because I am making chilli. It was odd then, that when I went into my spice cabinet I found three little containers of cloves (two of whole cloves, one of powdered cloves), three different kinds of pepper (red, black, white) three containers of paprika (two small, one large) and one large bottle of smoked paprika, ginger, basil, curry (yellow) tarragon, alum (I guess I was planning on canning), dill, sea-salt, regular salt, flavored salt, cream of tartar, parsley, basil, oregano, thyme, marjoram for pity's sake ...and yet no chilli pepper.

My spice cabinet is a testament to the power of disorganization in my life. I'm sure that I wound up with so much paprika because I baked something with paprika and then decided to do it again, and couldn't find the paprika, so bought another...and again...and so on. I'm not sure where the cloves came from though. I can't think of anything I've ever made with cloves. Maybe cloves are like odd socks and just reproduce when you're not looking.

But more than disorganization, the spice cabinet testifies to my frustrating journey through cooking. I'm not a natural cook. I don't really enjoy cooking; I enjoy the final product of cooking well enough, but cooking itself is a frustrating trip though the perilous waters of "I thought I had that in here somewhere." It never fails. I'm in the middle of cooking up an elaborate dinner when I realize that I need something stupid and essential that every chef who ever wrote a cookbook naturally has on hand. Something like olive oil (two open containers in my pantry at the moment), or white wine vinegar (got it), or oyster juice (ugh),or truffle oil (not a chance) or leeks (aren't you supposed to stick those in your hat or something?) The problem with buying such crazy, exclusive, and yet supposedly needed items is that I will use them once, and then they sit in my pantry, or in my spice cabinet as a silent, accusatory reminder that I don't try hard enough...and no matter how much I beat my children, I can't force them to eat my culinary masterpieces.

George will eat my cooking. He really appreciates a good home cooked meal because he's rarely home for dinner, and doesn't cook in any case. I eat my cooking, and even like it when I'm sure that the meat hasn't turned on me. I've been told that I'm a good cook on occasion. But when all your kids want to eat when you make Chicken Marsala is the wine-drunk mushrooms, you question the necessity of cooking at all. Perhaps I should just marinade some fungus and fry it up and serve it on a paper plate. The kids would probably be happy with that.

Even something as simple as chicken fingers has caused me trauma. I like chicken. Kids like chicken. They especially like chicken if it's unrecognizable (nugget or strip form) and so,  I found a great recipe (or so I thought) for chicken fingers. These little beauties  were tasty, flavorful, homemade and (important!!!)relatively easy to make. What's not to love? I even whipped up a batch of honey-mustard (yes, I know you can buy it) and when I was done, there were enough left over to freeze some for future meals.

There's a reason that these tasty treats are often referred to these days as 'chicken strips.'

"EW! Chicken fingers? That's gross, Mom!"
"Those poor chickens....Wait. Chickens have fingers?"

Chicken fingers were not a rousing success. The kids would rather eat KFC and not have to worry about what part of a chicken the "tender" is.

But whatever part of the chicken a "tender" happens to be, if the Colonel ever runs out of his eleven herbs and spices, he can probably find them all in my spice cabinet. I'm not using them at the moment...unless he finds the Chilli Powder. That one is mine.

FOUND IT!!!!

In my mind's eye

There are moments in my life that, even as they occurred, seemed to be suspended in time; it was as if someone had suspended them inside of a dome--a snow-globe of reality--and within that moment I felt as if nothing could touch me. Reality had stopped and I had a brief time to view life from the outside and simply admire the wonder of it.

This is not to say that all of these moments have been wonderful. A twelve year old murder victim one fall, lying on the ground beneath the trees on a residential parkway, lit by the flashing blue lights of responding police cars is preserved as one of these surreal moments; I remember the exact color of the blue autumn sky the day I stepped outside after I got the phone call telling me that my father had just died. I remember the birds flying overhead and the unfair beauty of the day. But also preserved in these bubbles of memory is the memory of  the first time I saw the Northern Lights as I floated on a glass smooth lake late one August; I can lie in bed and recall the comforting, blanket-like silence of the world as I sat by a campfire in the mountains watching stars fall during a meteor shower.

I remember the muffled sounds of the snow falling onto snow in Wisconsin as we returned from a hike with the kids. It was a strange silent day without birds or animals. There was only the sound of snow.  I didn't want to go out that day, but the hike provided me with some of the most beautiful winter images that I still hold in my mind...and it's one of the few suspended moments that I caught on camera and I can revisit it whenever I want to.

Some of these moments are so fleeting that they have become nearly mythic in my mind. I can recall a singular moment that occurred while walking through a stand of Sequoias. I will never forget the image of my children (often rivals, often fighting) holding hands and whispering in conspiratorial friendship. I have no proof that this moment happened. There is no preserved image of their camaraderie except in my mind, and I guard the picture jealously because I don't know if the picture, or their friendship, will last.

Just a few days ago when it snowed I stood in the parking lot at work and looked at the trees, their branches outlined by bright white snow against the dark of the early morning...and I took a picture with my mind. It's there with the rest of them. I don't know for how long, but it's there right now.

Wisconsin-coming back from a hike

Loads

I like doing laundry. It's loads of fun. For one thing, I like having clean laundry. Running around without underwear when you're wearing jeans chafes after awhile. I suppose I could get looser jeans, but that would take away the motivation for my exercise routine.

Doing laundry is also one of the few times I have to myself these days. It's not like there's a lot the kids can do to "help" me. They don't want to fold clothes. Heaven forbid they should put the laundry away! It only takes one person to load the washer or dryer. There's not a lot of extra room in the laundry room to play around; by default laundry is a one person job. I have a lot of time to think, and to make up stories while I do laundry, fold clothes, iron stuff that needs ironing. There are a lot of stories rattling around in my head right now about people who do laundry, fold clothes, iron stuff...I really should expand my horizons, but it would take too much energy.

Laundry can be relaxing in a zoning-out sort of way anyhow. You don't have to think about anything except whose clothes are whose, and which basket to put stuff into. Sometimes you have to decide whether or not that favorite pair of jeans will have one final return trip, or will be relegated to the rag-bag or the donation pile. My biggest problem until recently is debating how much drama will be incurred by not returning a favorite t-shirt when (three weeks down the line) it finally dawns on one of my offspring that they haven't seen their dinosaur/pokemon/fluffy-bunny shirt in ages!

At least that used to be all of the drama laundry day begat. Laundry has become slightly more harrowing for me in the past year, ever since I read an article about fecal matter in the laundry. I wish that I could find it again, just to prove to myself and all of my doubting colleagues that such a study exists...and to justify my excessive use of bleach on nearly everything. This article stated that a study had been done somewhere about the cleanliness of laundry coming out of the washer. The study stated that, on average, one gram of fecal matter is transferred from every load of underwear into your wash and can, in theory, contaminate several washings. The solution proposed by this article? Bleach the hell out of everything. Bleach your underwear, your socks, your towels, your bedsheets, your clothing, and presumably your pets and eyes too.

My first thought upon reading this was: Who the hell does a load of underwear? You would have to poop a lot wear a lot of underwear to make up a whole load. You would also have to not wash your underwear for about a month--and have a month's worth of underwear laid by--to make up a whole load of underwear.

And who would bleach it all every single time? I've seen the effects of bleach on non-whites, and it isn't pretty. I don't wear tighty-whities. I would ruin my underwear in a week...or in a month, because I would only be washing it once a month. Heck, even the effects of bleach on whites isn't pretty. The elastic starts to go, the material stretches...tighty-whities turn into saggy-baggies, and even whites turn a bit dingy after a few go-rounds in the paranoid bleach machine.

And then I thought: Holy crap! I wash underwear with towels! I can never shower again and hope to be clean!

Now, I don't know how much fecal matter a gram actually is. I'm American. That means I'm generally ignorant of the metric system. While I know that a gram of cocaine can get you high, if you actually asked me to measure a gram of fecal matter I'd have to go to a drug dealer and get him to scrape it out of my dirty underwear. But I figure that if a gram of cocaine can get you high then a gram of fecal matter is more than I want to contemplate having in my wash...or in my underwear.

All this laundry paranoia means four things:
1) I have to use bleach a lot more.
2) I have to install a bidet, or
3) make sure that people wipe the heck out of their rear ends. 
4) We have to find some way to get high on fecal matter.

It still might be gross, but at least we'll be too stoned to care.

I think it's time to go back to school!

Today was back to school day for the Brohlin household. It was a long winter break, but we decided to follow the CPS schedule to make it easier for the kids to have playdates, and (what the heck) it was nice for me too. A nice, long two week vacation. I stayed in bed a lot.

Back to work.

Caleb is learning subtraction--we began a new chapter today, one that deals with "subtraction of larger numbers with regrouping." Really?  I can only assume that the term "borrowing" was too misleading. I always thought we weren't really borrowing for heaven's sake; It wasn't like we returned the numbers after awhile. Thank the Lord we now have "subtraction of larger numbers with regrouping." That's not difficult for a seven year old to grasp at all. Soooooooo......



I'll tell you what Sue would do. I called it borrowing.

Hannah is learning about adding fractions with different denominators. She is thrilled (and I am sarcastic.) I think that she'll like math better next week better when we apply it to electrical circuits. Why electrical circuits when she is much more interested in astronomy? Because the numbers relating to electrical currents are easier to deal with than the numbers relating to celestial orbits. Duh.

I think I miss Mom the most when I'm trying to figure out ways to teach math. I always figured that she would be there to help me and give me feedback and advice. I don't know if she would like how I'm teaching...I'm not normally this insecure, but I can't help myself. I didn't 'get' math until I was older. I remember exactly when I understood. I was in Science of Electronics class that I was taking for fun (and to learn to wire microphones--I am married to a musician after all),when it hit me: "This is what they meant when they told me that I would use this algebra crap someday." It all fell into place at that point, and I learned to love math. I love the complexity, the sense, the fact that there are RIGHT ANSWERS! There are so few absolutes in the world, that I appreciated the order of math for the first time.

I don't want my kids to have to wait until they're older to understand this stuff. If they choose to be poets, good for them! But I don't want them to choose poetry because they couldn't handle the math in their science classes. I want them to choose poetry to be because they really love poetry (and ramen noodles--they won't be able to eat anything else), and the math is great to know for balancing what isn't in their checkbooks. 

I was thirty years old when I took that electronics class that opened my eyes. Thirty! As Caleb informed me the other day, "If you live to be a hundred, that's almost a third of your life!" (...and someday he will know how to borrow as well.)

Hair today...

When I was about ten, my mother cut my hair. This was traumatic for both of us. It was traumatic for me because I thought I wanted my hair cut... I didn't. I cried. I cried a lot. This was traumatic for my poor mother who never ever cut my hair again. Even when I was older and just wanted bangs, Mom wouldn't touch my hair. I had no idea how badly my "trauma" had affected her until Dad told me that she spent the night crying after I told her that I hated the haircut she gave me. I an still mortified by this. Kids can be jerks...me more than most.

My point is that I warned Hannah that she might be disappointed by a haircut, but that she should never forget that your hair grows back.

I shouldn't have worried. She loves it.

Hannah's new cut

My Artistes

We finally made it to the Art Institute today. (Note: this Chagall mosaic is not in the Art Institute, but rather in Exelon Plaza, which used to be Bank One Plaza or something like that. I don't know.) We got off the el at Monroe, went upstairs, and there was this lovely mosaic. This set the tone for the day. Beautiful, slightly insane, off kilter...
"Why are there birds falling from the sky?!" at the top of our lungs kind of day.

"Because, my dear, my darling, my love, my life--that is how the artist saw the world," said Mommy for the umpteenth time wearily.

"So lots of birds used to fall out of the sky? This says 1942. Did a lot of birds die in 1942?"

"I don't know, we'll have to look it up, won't we?"

"They were strange in 1942."

*sigh* And you are totally normal, I suppose?

The day was fun, but a mixed bag. We took the el downtown--always a treat--saw this Chagall, went to the museum, saw the Impressionists, some Old Masters, American Art prior to 1900, Architectural Artifacts, Textile art of the United States prior to 1900, the America Window (another Chagall) the Thorne Miniatures, Asian sculpture and art...it was kind of like the Cliff Notes of art. We were speed dating the major artistic movements that predated the 21st century.

"I like art, don't be offended," Hannah announced to me as we also saw the cafeteria, "But when you see a lot of it in big quiet rooms, it gets a little um...." she was thinking of a nice way to say boring, I was sure. "Too much," she finished.

"You know what I noticed?" Caleb asked, again at the top of his lungs when we were standing in front of  Monet's water lilies. ("These rooms are so quiet I don't always know if you can hear me," he explained.) "These artists--they're artists because when you look at what they did, they just globbed paint on their pictures, but it actually looks like something! That's why it's art."

"Do they have a museum store?" Hannah demanded.

Why, yes. There was a museum store. I didn't get them anything though. Enlarging their minds should be enough. It's a tough job to squeeze more in those big heads of theirs though. I only hope some of it sticks--like the gobs of paint that make up water lilies.

This is my lovely water-heater. Note: there is no tank. This has been a great money-saver for us, and I couldn't be happier. It does take a bit longer to get hot water upstairs, but I've never been concerned with that. I can wash my hands in lukewarm water as well as in hot water as long as I use soap. I've washed most of my clothes in cold water for years anyhow.

But the guy who installed it said that by law he couldn't set the hot water temperature any hotter than 120F. No problem. It was a hot summer.

But now it's a cold winter. I want it hot. I want it can't-stay-in-a-minute-longer hot. I want it burning-in-heck hot. Sometimes you just need to feel like a boiled lobster in the winter. Instead I feel like a slightly warm and clammy goldfish. (Sorry, couldn't find a decent comparison. Anyone got something better?)

The kids are old enough now not to scald themselves. I wish there had been some kind of release to sign to say that YES, we are adults, perfectly capable of scalding ourselves if we wish; there wasn't. So now I have to find the manual and figure out how to turn this puppy up, because what is winter for if not for getting colder than a mega-corporation's overseas expansion agenda and then diving into a hot, hot, hot tub.

Me!